When Abraham Lincoln once was asked to tell the story of his life, he
replied:
“It is contained in one line of Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’:
“‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”
That was true at the time he said it, as everything else he said was
Truth, but he was then only at the beginning of a career that was
to glorify him as one of the heroes of the world, and place his name
forever beside the immortal name of the mighty Washington.
Many great men, particularly those of America, began life in humbleness
and poverty, but none ever came from such depths or rose to such a
height as Abraham Lincoln.
His birthplace, in Hardin county, Kentucky, was but a wilderness,
and Spencer county, Indiana, to which the Lincoln family removed when
Abraham was in his eighth year, was a wilder and still more uncivilized
region.
The little red schoolhouse which now so thickly adorns the country
hillside had not yet been built. There were scattered log schoolhouses,
but they were few and far between. In several of these Mr. Lincoln got
the rudiments of an education--an education that was never finished, for
to the day of his death he was a student and a seeker after knowledge.
Some records of his schoolboy days are still left us. One is a book
made and bound by Lincoln himself, in which he had written the table of
weights and measures, and the sums to be worked out therefrom. This was
his arithmetic, for he was too poor to own a printed copy.